MAS Combat Simulation
H. Van Dyke Parunak
4. Discussion
4.2. Further Extensions
The success we have enjoyed with polyagents (in industrial and intelligence ap- plications as well as in military simulation) encourages us to develop and extend the technique. Three of these extensions are the use of a non-spatial environment, sensor planning, and generalization of the architectures application to integrating multiple reasoners.
Stigmergic mechanisms such as those used by a polyagents ghosts require a structured environment in which agents can have a location and with which they can interact locally. In both of the applications discussed in this chapter, the environment is spatial, a regular lattice of place agents that tiles the two- dimensional manifold of the earths surface. Many domains would profit from the ability to develop plans and make predictions over non-spatial structures such as semantic networks and social networks. Unlike lattices, these networks exhibit small-world structure [33], in which distances are not well defined. In spite of this limitation, we have had encouraging results in preliminary experiments in such topologies.
The plans and predictions generated by our systems are currently used by humans. A natural next step is to integrate our reasoning into a closed-loop system.
For example, predictions on where the adversary might be could automatically deploy sensors in that area, and feedback from those sensors would then update the predictor.
Perhaps the most broadly applicable extension is generalizing the notion of using a simulation to integrate multiple reasoners. Many reasoners can express their results either through a field over some topology, or by describing the behavior of some process executing over the topology. The first class of results lends itself to representation as a pheromone field, while the second can be translated directly into ghost personalities. The BEEs evolutionary loop can automatically assess the usefulness of such results in modeling observed behavior, integrating them into an overall result and adjusting the relative prominence given to the various inputs as the external situation evolves.
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